Here's one civic program with no middle ground

The people who help coordinate Long Beach Unified’s middle school sports program get an awesome feeling every time they see a young sixth-, seventh- or eighth-grader score a goal, make a basket or win a race.

They get an even greater charge when the parent of a student-athlete winning a race quietly notes that they, too, once competed in middle schools sports.

It’s one of the most warming examples of what happens when educators, parents and community leaders find common ground on a program which has a multigenerational impact on young lives.

For the 26th time, the Long Beach Century Club will hold a banquet tonight at 6 at The Grand to recognize the champions of the 14 middle school sports competing at 26 different schools in different genders and different divisions. When it first started, the low-key banquet drew about 300 kids and their parents.

Last year, more than 800 attended the banquet.

“When we first started,” said Sam Breuklander, the long-time tax adviser who has corralled all the moving parts if this fete for 26 year, “it was the kids and the parents.

“Then it was the kids and parents and grandparents, and then along came the uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters.”

The Century Club has been the go-to resource for athletic support since the ’50s, and its archives indicate donations to schools of all stripes since it first opened for business.

The sports program goes back even farther. The city designed a recreational program for school athletics on the K-8 level in 1929 and it stayed intact until 1974, when funding put a crimp in the parks and recreational program.

It almost dissolved after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 all but crippled public services. It took the work, free of charge and a full-time job of its own, of simple educators to keep school sports alive.

The middle school program came when grades six to eight became junior highs or middle schools. The late Howard Lyon fought to maintain school sports when shortsighted people were saying they should be scrubbed to save costs.

“Howard came to us at a time when each school would have their own little celebrations,” Breuklander said. “He wanted to see if we could bring it all together so more people would take notice.”

“They held some of the celebrations at the police pistol shooting range,” Century Club veteran Dan Gooch recalled.

The Century Club’s participation did focus attention and led to split divisions for competition so the smaller schools weren’t participating against the bigger ones. It also came at the same time that girls sports were growing in scope and importance, too.

“It was good for the club,” Breuklander said. “We’d always been involved when schools needed help, but this was a way to bring it all together.

“Everyone here wants to take care of the kids. It’s what the club has always been about. We’ll probably have 50 club members working the event, and it will include people like Bruce Bradley and Susie Atwood who grew up here and participated in the city’s youth programs.”

The success of the middle school sports program is astonishing when you realize how often it’s been disputed. When the recreation program was first challenged in the early ’70s, it was at a time when there was widespread concern about street violence – as if the people who wanted to save a few nickels in tax money couldn’t comprehend the potential downside.

Prop. 13 set everyone in a tizzy and it’s safe to say school sports would have been axed if the core of educators in Long Beach hadn’t stepped up to personally insure its survival.

The 2008 recession was its own tizzy. The school district red-lined the $300,000 expense in the budget for middle school sports, not because they wanted to cut it, but because they knew support to keep it would have to come from outside.

And it did. The yearlong fundraising program exceeded the needs and would up putting enough money back into the program so that it stays in the budget.

Breuklander said more than 300 trophies will be handed out tonight.

There’s a standard joke about youth sports now that everyone gets a trophy, and there are more participants than athletes. But the middle school program and the Century Club negate that argument with the best weapons of all – time, organization and respect.

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